The Shocking Truth Behind the Great Vibrator Myth That Nobody Told You
Going back to Lieberman and Schatzberg, they note multiple instances where Maines distorts or misinterprets her sources in service of her narrative:
“Maines’ second key claim is that genital use of vibrators was a standard treatment for hysteria and related ailments, such as neurasthenia. [The] sources she cites contradict this claim. Some of her cited sources do not even mention hysteria, while most of her sources on hysteria do not mention vibrators. Even when medical sources did endorse vibration treatment for hysteria, it was rarely a primary treatment, and never recommended for application to the vulva…
[In one example], Maines twists a quote to make it seem to support her claim about clitoral massage for hysteria:
In 1903 Samuel Howard Monell effectively summarized the demand of physicians since Hippocrates for some simple means of getting results with their hysterical patients:
“Pelvic massage (in gynecology) has its brilliant advocates and they report wonderful results, but when practitioners must supply the skilled technic with their own fingers the method has no value to the majority.” For physicians in this line of work, the vibrator was a godsend: “Special applicators (motor-driven) give practical value and office convenience of what to what otherwise is impractical.”
On its face, this quote appears to be strong evidence. However, the context of the quote shows otherwise. Maines implies that Monell was discussing hysterical patients; however, nowhere in the book does he mention treating hysteria with pelvic massage. In fact, the quoted passage occurs in a discussion of massage for “fractures, dislocations, and sprains.”
Even more questionable is Maines’s claim that Victorian doctors viewed clitoral massage as non-sexual and thus unproblematic. By the 16th Century, when marriage and regular intercourse were commonly prescribed to release built-up “female seed”, physicians such as Pieter van Foreest and Gioanni Matteo da Grado vigorously opposed any substitute procedure such as the manual manipulation of the genitals by either the patient or a doctor. Such manipulation was seen as explicitly sexual, and only recommended as a last resort – and even then, it was only ever performed by female midwives, not male doctors. Thus, the claim that Victorian doctors 300 years later would be unaware of the sexual nature of clitoral massage is patently absurd. In The Technology of Orgasm, Maines herself even states that:
“Theodore Thomas, for example, wrote in 1891 that the purpose of the clitoris was ‘to furnish to the female the nervous erethrism which is necessary to a perfect performance and completion of the sexual act’ and went on to observe that orgasm could be produced by clitoral stimulation ‘outside of intercourse’”
Indeed, that vibrators could be used for sexual stimulation was well-understood by contemporary doctors like the amusingly-named American gynaecologist James Craven Wood, who wrote in 1917:
“The greatest objection to vibration thus applied is that in overly sensitive patients it is liable to cause sexual excitement… [but if] the vibratode is kept well back from the clitoris, there is but little danger of causing such excitement.”
Hallie Lieberman further drives home the absurdity of Maines’s claim in a 2020 New York Times article, writing that:
“Imagine arguing that at the turn of the 20th century, female nurses were giving hand jobs to male patients to treat them for psychological problems; that men didn’t realize anything sexual was going on; that because female nurses’ wrists got tired from all the hand jobs, they invented a device called a penis pump to help speed up the process. Then imagine claiming nobody thought any of this was sexual, because it was a century ago.”
On this note, in The Technology of Orgasm, Maines outlines her second major claim by stating:
“…the androcentric definition of sex as an activity recognizes three essential steps: preparation for penetration (‘foreplay’), penetration, and male orgasm. Sexual activity that does not involve at least the last two has not been popularly or medically (and for that matter legally) regarded as ‘the real thing’…since no penetration was involved, believers in the hypothesis that only penetration was sexually gratifying to women could argue that nothing sexual could be occurring when their patients experienced the hysterical paroxysm during treatment.”
In reality, as Lieberman and Schatzberg point out:
“…the historical evidence demonstrates that penetrative use of vibrators was actually a standard medical practice. Most vibrator companies produced penetrative vaginal attachments, and nearly every vibrator sold to physicians included these…ironically, when Maines argues that massage with vibrators only occurred on the vulva, her sources demonstrate the opposite point: they show that massage occurred inside the vagina…
Furthermore, of the sources Maines cites in support of this claim, only one explicitly recommended using electrotherapeutic devices on the vulva, a 1909 book by female physician May Cushman Rice. However, Rice was not referring to treating hysteria, but rather to the use of high-frequency electrodes to treat vulvitis, inflammation of the vulva. A few pages later, she suggested treating vaginismus (vaginal muscular spasms) by applying internal vaginal electrodes. Again, Rice never mentioned hysteria or hinted at anything that could be interpreted as sexual stimulation. As with the other sources we discuss, Rice’s work lends no support to Maines’ core claims.”
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